The speech community

In Labov’s department stores experiment, speakers used more (r)-1 pronunciations as the prestige of the store increased, and individually they used more of these pronunciations when repeating the words fourth floor, i.e. when they were paying more attention to their speech. So while they didn’t all speak in the same way, they did at least agree on how they felt they should try to speak in careful style. Labov says this type of agreement is indicative of a speech community: while usage may vary considerably across its members, the community nonetheless shares speech norms (1972: 120):

The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behaviour and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of language.

Interestingly, if a similar experiment were done in a rhotic area of England (i.e. an area in which non-prevocalic /r/ is still pronounced), it is likely that the pattern observed in New York would be reversed, i.e. the high status store would use least (r)-1 and speakers would tend to delete them more in careful speech, because /r/-deletion rather than /r/-retention is prestigious in England. Sociolinguistic variation, then, lends the best support to the dictum that England and America are ‘two nations separated by a common language’.

The method adopted by Labov’s team was to identify in each store items known in advance to be on sale on the fourth floor, and approach shop assistants to ask where they could be found. When the expected answer fourth floor came it duly provided two instances (or tokens) of (r) in two different environments, the first in preconsonantal position and the second word-finally. By feigning not to have heard, the researchers could then elicit a repetition of the two words in what Labov called emphatic style, in which, it is reasonable to presume, informants would be speaking more carefully to ensure they were properly understood. The researcher would then note the four tokens in two environments and two speech styles, from an informant completely unaware of having taken part in a sociolinguistic experiment.